No More Super Bowls For Green Bay
With Mike McCarthy given a contract extension until 2019, the Packer fans hope for another Super Bowl win or participation in a Super Bowl, went down the drain. Since McCarthy came on board, the Packers have managed to be in 1 Super Bowl, yes that’s right, 1 SuperBowl which they won. Since they make the playoffs often maybe that is not bad EXCEPT this is the talent McCarthy has had at his disposal:
Aaron Rodgers
Brette Favre
Jordy Nelson
Clay Matthews,
Charles Woodsen
Donald Driver
Ryan Longwell
Sterling Sharpe
Randall Cobb
A.J. Hawk
Antonio Freeman
Mark Chmura
John Kuhn
Gilbert Brown
Greg Jennings
With the best quarterbacks in the league his entire time coaching the Packers, and plenty of talent at other positions, all McCarthy had to do is put on the field a defense which could at least play at the middle of the pack in the league. With Favre or Rodgers at the helm the Packers can beat most teams on that alone. Then add the talent listed above and the Packers should be routinely in the Super Bowl. Yet they managed it only once.
Anyone who has ever watched Green Bay play any of the other top teams in the league has witnessed how badly the Packers get out-coached. The man stands on the sidelines and stares desperately at his chosen list of play calls. The Packers have one of the worst coaching staffs in the league, perhaps with an exception here and there. The best of players cannot make plays if they are not put in a position by the play calls to make a tackle, or catch the ball etc. The other good teams know almost exactly what McCarthy plans to do since he is the kind of coach who feels if you run standard plays and do them well, you win. That hasn’t been true for years. With all the gadgets at hand to design innovative play calls, the object these days is to outsmart your opponent with play calls that take advantage of the defense, or have a defensive scheme which thwarts the plays being called by the offense.
The Packers will often make the playoffs on the basis of a Rodgers or Favre and the others named above, but in the end an incompetent coaching staff will doom them almost every time once in the playoffs.
So, Packer fans, enjoy the individual talents of many players on your team, and learn to be satisfied getting often into the playoffs, but that is the most you can hope for as long as McCarthy coaches the team, and picks others on the coaching staff. With no expectations of going any further, learn to be sympathetically amused during playoff games as McCarthy stares in disbelief at his clipboard play calls and sweats profusely at why they are not working. He had scouted the teams so carefully and designed his plays with so much care, but the other team is not using play calls he expected and so he is stymied. He makes what changes he is capable of making, but he doesn’t seem to be a swift thinker or have the means at his disposal to make any significant changes during the game.
McCarthy is a nice guy who tries exceptionally hard and is a perfect fit for the Packer Management, a good fit for the ‘good ole boys’ club which runs the Packers. The NFL likes to call the Packers a publicly owned football team, but like most everything done by the NFL, little is how they make it out to be. There is no segment of the public which has any control over Packer Management, no public official, no public voting by anyone on administrative personnel, useless stock certificates which have no power over anything, and so, in truth, the public has less say over the Green Bay Packers than the public has over other teams. With the other teams, the owners are there to maximize their wealth. Winning increases profits a lot, so other owners would not put up with McCarthy for more than a couple of years and his ass would be gone.
The Packers are like the Cubs, and maybe this is not a bad thing. Both fan bases will support the team no matter what, win or lose, and perhaps this is not such a bad thing. Loyalty, not winning, becomes King. That’s not so bad I guess either. It is what it is.
